Glorious Rivals(38)

Lyra turned slowly to look at him. “We can’t keep circling each other, either.”

Grayson really should have been expecting that. He’d told her that he was falling for her. Knowing that she might run, he had told her anyway. And now…

Now, Lyra Kane was reaching to grab the front of his shirt. She was pulling him toward her. “What happened while I was gone?” Grayson murmured.

Lyra’s eyes glittered in the moonlight. “Maybe I just feel like doing a little more damage.” She surged upward, and Grayson caught her face in his hands as her lips crashed into his.

A moment later, his hands were buried in her hair.

Grayson had known from their first kiss that there would be a second, but he hadn’t been expecting this from her. Here. Now. Grayson pulled back just far enough to breathe out four words. “Away from the ledge.” He moved, and she moved with him.

“I don’t like being told what to do,” Lyra said, her lips brushing his with every word.

“I am aware,” Grayson replied. They kissed again, and Grayson let it all come. The chill of the night air. The feel of her skin. The right kind of disaster just waiting to happen.

The last thing that Grayson wanted was to stop kissing, to put any space whatsoever between them, but his sense of honor sent up a reminder about why he was here. He’d committed to seeing phase two through for her, and as often as he’d redirected Lyra’s attention to the game for his own purposes, Grayson owed her the decency of focusing on the puzzle himself.

Midnight was rapidly approaching. The clock was ticking.

Parting, even a fraction of an inch, was sweet and torturous sorrow. “If we want to win,” Grayson murmured—we, not just her. “For your family. For Mile’s End. We need to play. Everything else can wait.”

Even this.

Lyra looked at him for the longest time, just looked at him, like she was on the verge of saying something. And then, she looked back out at the island. “Then let’s play.”

Chapter 34

ROHAN

Rohan stood at the edge of the ocean, wave after wave washing onto the shore, stopping just short of his feet. The darkness, the water—it was like pressing on a bruise. I never did learn to swim all that well, he’d told Savannah.

There was a utility to pain, mental clarity in mastering it.

Gripping that clarity with both hands, Rohan willed himself into the labyrinth of his mind, sorting through information—the music box puzzle; letters scrawled across Savannah’s bare arm; a pair of photographs belonging to Brady Daniels; Jameson Hawthorne viewing Lyra Kane as a threat.

Back in reality, a bigger wave broke. Rohan refused to step back as the water washed up and over his feet. In the corridors of the labyrinth, an unwanted memory reared its head.

A woman humming. Safe and warm. And then a man’s voice: “Give him to me.” Rohan could have fought the memory, could have shut it down, but he did not. It was, after all, just another bruise.

“Please,” he could hear the woman say.

And then the man: “We both know you’re going to give him to me eventually, and if you fight me on it, if you disobey me again, it’s going to be so much worse when you do.”

The sound of footsteps pulled Rohan back to the present. Primed to fight and ready to win, he turned, and there she was: Savannah Grayson, glorious even in the dark.

“How are you at groveling, British?”

“Nowhere near as good as I am at lording my victories over people,” Rohan replied. “Why?”

“You’re going to want to grovel.”

Figured something out, did you, love? And she’d come to him with it, as a partner should. Rohan took a step toward her. “Tell me, Savvy, what kind of groveling did you have in mind?”

Some time later, Rohan stepped into the Great Room. No dominoes. The gleaming wood floor was very nearly bare. Rohan noted a violin and a bow, both leaned neatly against the wall, but Savannah ignored them as she strode to the black granite fireplace. A fire now burned inside it—the first time it had been lit, as far as Rohan knew, since the start of the game.

“Is there a switch?” Rohan asked. “Or was it remotely triggered?”

Savannah didn’t bother answering that. “I tried warming the music box first, to no avail. Same for the bracelet, the charms, the dice, and the lock on my chain.”

“And then…” Rohan strode to stand beside her, in front of the crackling flames. “You tried Brady’s photographs.”

“Did I?” Savannah replied.

Yes.

As Rohan watched, Savannah held one of the photographs of Calla Thorp—the worn one, the one that Rohan suspected Brady had carried with him for years—up to the fire. As the paper warmed, letters began to appear on the back, a message in feminine script.

Do exactly as I say.

“It strikes me,” Rohan murmured, “that there is more than one kind of sponsor.”

Brady Daniels had been invited to this game by the Hawthorne heiress herself. That meant that any would-be sponsors would have had very little time to approach him and make their case. In the previous year’s game, resources had mattered. Sponsors had something to offer. But this year?

This year, external resources had only been a boon in the initial hunt for wild card tickets. Given that Brady wasn’t a wild card, his sponsor had to have played this a different way.